The Women

And you previewed at the end of that something was coming this year.

So I'm so excited to be able to talk to you about your new book, Jungle Red, the making of MGM's The Women.

It's such a fun read for those of us who love the movie, but it's also a fun read, I think, for people who don't know the movie, too.

Exactly, because it's a, excuse me, it's a cast of characters.

Yeah.

No, it really is.

I mean, just the whole culture surrounding the making of the women was – I mean, it's a who's who of the middle part of the 20th century or the early middle part of the 20th century.

And yeah, it's so fun to see all of the different six degrees of separation between everybody.

Yeah.

So we, I don't know if we've, I think we have watched movies where Adrian was the costume designer because he was the costume designer in The Women, for sure.

But his real name was Adrian Adolph Greenberg, and he was Jewish, and he called himself Gilbert Adrian, and then he just shortened it to Adrian when he got to Hollywood.

His father was a milliner.

So he began as a designer for Cecil B. DeMille, and then he became the MGM designer.

and did costumes for 250 movies in his years at MGM.

In addition to this movie, he did Dinner at Eight, The Women, The Wizard of Oz.

So the costumes are just distinctive from the get-go.

I can't think – I know her from a million things, but off the top of my head, I can't think of where we've seen her.

She's Norma Shearer's mother in The Women.

She's the owl.

She's Mrs. Moorhead in The Women.

Yeah.

If you've seen her in one, you've seen her in a hundred things, and she's always wonderful.

Well, we're going to talk about 1939.

Just to show the extent of Adrienne's talents, watch the women.

You'll see how Adrienne showed a range of character through costume.

So Mary Haynes, played by Norma Shearer, is adorned in that elegant white gown signifying the perfect wife.

Because he

really wanted to show the different social rivalries and the wealth of these women in the movie.

And he ended up, all in all, I think he designed over 200 gowns just for the women alone.

Well, there's another film that we want to talk about that he designed in 1939.

It's kind of negligible.

More enjoyable was The Women.

Have you seen The Women, Cameron? This seems like something you would like.

I don't think so.

George Cukor made a movie with no men, 1939.

And I love the movies where the majority of them are in black and white, but you get little bits of...

You know, I, I think probably one of the greatest examples is "The Women," um-

Mm-hmm

... where you get that fashion show where you could totally take that out of the movie and it doesn't matter.